


Therapeutic Alliance

by Owlix



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-09
Updated: 2014-05-09
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1565939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlix/pseuds/Owlix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max needs therapy. Rung is a patient and caring therapist. Together, they work towards healing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Therapeutic Alliance

 

“I killed a lot of people at Simanzi.”

Fort Max sat awkwardly on Rung’s couch, hands gripping the edge. He didn’t lie down during sessions - not any more. He didn’t even recharge lying down these days. He couldn’t. Not after spending so long on his back in a coma, fever-dreaming. Not after Garrus-9 -- after the parody of a recharge slab in that dark room, after the nails, after--

“I know you did,” Rung said, jolting Fort Max back to the present. Rung’s voice was even, as always. Absent of judgment or praise. “I’ve read over the reports. And I remember the battle.”

“I was young,” Fort Max said. “I was very young. I’m not like you. I don’t even remember a time without this war. I’d been forged not too long before the battle really started. I didn’t understand what I was doing... Not really. It was easy.”

“Well, you have the right build for it,” Rung said. “And with the upgrades they gave you, I’m sure that just made it easier.”

“No,” Fort Max said. “No, I don’t mean easy that way.” He swallowed, mouth uncomfortably dry. “I killed a lot of people.”

“I’m not going to judge you for that, Max. Or praise you for it. You know that.” Rung handed him a glass of energon. “I want to know how you feel about this.”

Fort Max took the glass. It was designed for someone closer to Rung’s size, not a tank like him. It felt small and delicate in his hands. He sipped from it for a moment before putting it down again.

“Max?” Fort Max flinched. Rung was staring at him from, waiting. “The violence you committed at Simanzi - how do you feel about it?”

Proud, he should’ve said. His side had lost that battle, but Fort Max knew that it could’ve gone much worse - and that if it had, they may have lost the war then and there. And that battle was what he was known for. How he’d made a name for himself. But--

“I was tired of it,” Fort Max said. “No, more than tired. I-- I didn’t want to kill any more people. When they built Garrus-9 and they were looking for a warden, I volunteered. Because I didn’t want to be on the front lines any more.”

Rung didn’t speak, and Fort Max was afraid to look at him, insides churning.

“You’re ashamed of that,” Rung finally said.

“Don’t think I don’t know what people say about me.” Fort Max grimaced. “They call me a coward. A has-been. Too afraid to say it where I can hear, but I know. And I know what they’re thinking when they look at me. But High Command needed someone to be warden at G-9. Someone strong enough to handle such a high-value target, and I--”

Fort Max trailed off, realizing abruptly that he was gripping Rung’s couch tight enough to dent the metal. He forced his fingers to unclench.

“Max,” Rung said gently. “You don’t have to justify your decisions to me. You know that.”

Fort Max stared down at the damage he’d done. He forced his hands into his own lap.

“I thought maybe I could help them,” Fort Max said. “Help the prisoners. It wasn’t just Decepticon POWs and war criminals. There were Autobots there, too. I thought maybe I could rehabilitate them. Do some good, instead of--”

Instead of killing. Instead of what he had been built for.

“And did you?” Rung asked.

Fort Max swallowed again, mouth still dry. But he was afraid he would break the glass if he tried to pick it up, so he left it where it was.

“No,” he said. “No. It was… It wasn’t like I’d expected it to be. Most of the prisoners were in spark stasis. And the ones that weren’t…”

“Yes?” Rung prompted, after a long silence.

“The things I’d done at Simanzi stayed with me. I tried to be a good warden. To be professional. But I wasn’t always -- I hurt people. Maybe they deserved to be hurt, but I-- I shouldn’t have done it.”

When Fort Max glanced at him, Rung was staring at his face.

“Last session, we talked about your feelings about what was done to you on Garrus-9,” Rung said. “You told me that you feel like you still carry it with you. Like what was done to you is still inside of you, trying to get out.”

Fort Max looked away again.

“Was this the same way?” Rung asked. “Hurting them the way that you’d been hurt in the war?”

Fort Max flinched. He didn’t want to think about it that way. Didn’t want to think about it at all.

“No,” he said. “No, it isn’t the same thing at all.”

Rung watched him silently, expression inscrutable.

“It isn’t,” Max said again. "The things I think about doing to _him_ , they--"

“Yes, Max?”

“They’re--” He forced himself to say the words. “I think about torturing him. Torturing him the way he did to me.”

“That’s not abnormal, Max. After what was done to you, it would be unusual if you didn’t have such thoughts. I know they trouble you. We can work together to help you let them go.”

Fort Max didn’t like having those thoughts in his head. They did trouble him. But he didn’t want to let them go. He wanted to work them out by putting them into action. By turning his violent thoughts into a violent reality. If he could only hurt Overlord as thoroughly as Overlord had hurt him -- if he could only take the twisted feelings Overlord had left him with and give them back again, put them right back where they’d come from--

“Max?”

Fort Max realized that he was gripping his fists tight in his lap, his engine revving in eager anticipation. He forced it to go quiet.

“I tried,” he said. “Garrus-9 was the best-run prison in the series. I ran it as cleanly as I could. Kept the violence down. But I-- I made mistakes. I turned a blind eye to things I should have stopped. I allowed things I shouldn’t have.”

Rung just waited, listening.

“I was the one who let Arcee out,” Fort Max said evenly as he stared down at his own hands. “It was Jetfire’s idea, but I was the warden, and I authorized it. I let her out. She tortured him for years. For _six years_. And I was the one who let her do it.”

He had been tortured for three. Three years had been more than enough to break him. Three years, almost to the day, and his body and mind were broken so badly that Overlord had grown tired of him. Had discarded him. Had turned his body into a tool, into...

“Yes,” Rung said. “I know. It’s there in the official incident records.”

“We let her out, and she tortured him, and _I didn’t care_. The only reason it mattered to me at all was because we were scolded. But we barely got a reprimand, and afterwards, we--” He swallowed. “We _laughed_ about it. I knew he’d been tortured, I knew it was because of my decision, and I didn’t care.”

“And now you do care?” Rung asked, vocalizer thick with empathy that Fort Max didn’t deserve.

He sat there staring at his hands, unable to bring himself to answer.

When he’d been -- during the three years on Garrus-9… The rank-and-file Decepticons had walked by him like he was furniture. He’d begged, sometimes. He’d begged, and they’d laughed, if they acknowledged him at all. It had seemed almost worse than the torture, that so many people could walk by him and be so indifferent to his pain. But he had laughed too, just like they --

“Max?”

Fort Max’s hands were fisted in his lap. Rung lay a hand on them, gently. Fort Max wished he wouldn’t do that; he couldn’t feel Rung’s hand on his without remembering what it had felt like to rip out Rung’s thumb while Rung begged him to stop.

But Rung had told him that the touch would help ground him. Rung said that Fort Max tended to dissociate - a coping mechanism, a temporary disconnecting of emotion-driving modules in the neural net that made everything seem cold and meaningless. It was meant to assist short-term survival in dangerous situations. Short term -- not to flicker on and off constantly for three years, two months, and ten days, in some desperate doomed attempt to shield him from the effects of prolonged, merciless, unending torture.

“Max,” Rung said.

Fort Max had asked Rung to use that name. The name his friends used. The name that, during those three years, Overlord had used too.

Fort Max wanted to hear it and feel relief and recognition again, and not fear and creeping inevitable anticipation and --

“Fortress Maximus,” Rung said, stern.

Fort Max flinched and returned to himself. Rung’s small hand squeezed his own. It was all Fort Max could do to force himself to glance up briefly at Rung’s face.

“Be here with me, Max,” Rung said. “Take a moment to be here with me.”

And Fort Max did, the way that Rung had taught him. He listened his own internal mechanisms, grounding himself in the here and now. He checked his internal systems status reports instead of stubbornly ignoring them: ventilation rate up, pain sensors dialed down as far as his safety systems would allow, weapons systems pinging him for permission to activate, fuel-lines close to the surface restricted to prevent unnecessary fuel-loss in the case of an injury. He felt his own body, limbs taut with anticipation, jaw clenched.

But there was no danger here. No imminent pain. His body and mind had gone back to the past. Fort Max tried hard to remain in the present instead.

Rung stroked the back of his hand. Slowly, Fort Max processed his internal status reports, rejecting the request for weapons activation three times before it finally stopped pinging him. He unwound his body and unclenched his fists and his jaw.

“Good, Max,” Rung said, sincere pride in his voice. “Very well done.”

Fort Max felt torn between pride at the praise and shame. He was supposed to be strong. Supposed to be stronger than this.

“Do you need to take a break?” Rung asked. “We don’t have to rush this.”

“No,” Fort Max said, too loud. He flinched at the sound of his own voice, saying that word, loud and broken. “No,” he repeated, softer. “I’m all right. I want to talk about it.”

He looked down at Rung’s hand on his, trying not to think of the noise his thumb had made when Fort Max had forced it out of joint.

“I -- I care, now.”

“I know you do,” Rung said. He went still, and Fort Max could feel him staring at his face. “Something has changed in you.” Not quite a question.

It was all Fort Max could do to nod.

“How do you feel about that change?”

“I--”

 _I loathe it_ , he wanted to say. _It repulses me. Everything about what was done to me disgusts me._ He was tainted. Overlord had dug his hands inside of his internal mechanisms, had buried his voice and his cruelty deep inside of Fort Max’s neural net and left it there. And Fort Max wanted to undo all of it. Wanted to forget. Wanted it gone.

But he didn’t want to undo this. He didn’t want this small aspect of himself to go back to the way he had been before. He didn’t want to be the mech who could be indifferent to someone else’s torture.

It seemed laughable that anything about this could have made him better. Laughable, but also profoundly, deeply wrong.

“It’s all right, Max,” Rung said, small hand still clasping his. Fort Max realized, to his horror and disgust, that he was shaking, and that something inside of him was emitting a high-pitched whine. “Hush, now. It’s all right.”

“But it’s not,” Fort Max said. The whining sound in his engine faltered up a higher pitch. “It’s wrong. It’s all wrong. How could anything good have come from that? Have come from _him_?”

“Oh, Max,” Rung said, voice thick with love and pain, and Fort Max wanted abruptly and irrationally to comfort _him_ , to tell him not to feel so much for his sake. Not to care. Fort Max didn’t deserve it. But Rung’s hand tightened on his, small but steady. “As I’ve come to know you, one thing about you has increasingly impressed me. Do you know what that is?”

The whining from Fort Max’s engine stuttered to a stop. He didn’t. His physical strength, he wanted to say. His ability to cause damage and to kill. That was the only thing anyone had ever seen of value in him. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. And anyway, he had ruined that - ruined even that one skill by turning it against his own side. So he just shook his head.

“Your _resilience_ , Max.”

Max wanted to argue - resilience? He was weak. He had been broken. But the words wouldn’t come, so he just listened, still and quiet, and focusing on the feel of Rung’s hand.

“You survived what was done to you Garrus-9,” Rung said, his voice warm and sincere and infinitely tender. “To survive - just that was a profound accomplishment. But you’ve done more than just that, Max. You’ve found the strength, not just to live through this, but to learn from it. To grow. To change yourself into someone better than you were.”

“But--” Max said, voice faltering. “But something good shouldn’t come from _him_. From _that_.”

“It didn’t,” Rung said, and he was smiling now. “Oh, Max. It came from _within you._ ”

Fort Max shuddered at the words. It was too much; still shaking, he leaned forward until his forehead pressed against Rung’s small shoulder. His optics flickered off.

Rung put one small arm around him and held him, patient and stable and impossibly kind. He whispered soft, comforting words and stroked Fort Max’s back. Despite Fort Max’s weight. Despite the way he shook. Despite the shameful, pathetic sounds he made.

Fort Max let Rung hold him for a long time, until he finally went calm and quiet and still. And even then, Rung didn’t let go, and it was a long time until Fort Max finally pulled away.


End file.
